Hoyle himself remembered the meeting in a more positive light:

To my surprise, Willy didn’t laugh when I explained the difficulty. I cannot remember whether he called in a Kellogg mob [the nuclear physics group that included, among others, Ward Whaling, William Wenzel, Noel Dunbar, Charles Barnes, and Ralph Pixley] there and then, or whether it was a few hours or a day or two later . . . It was then that general consensus decided a new experiment should be done.

In an interview in 2001, neither Ward Whaling nor Noel Dunbar remembered any specific details of this meeting, but Charles Barnes recalled that Willy’s rather small office was packed and that “as Fred presented his ideas, it was clear that the audience was visibly skeptical. Even Willy seemed to be somewhat skeptical.” Whatever precisely happened at that meeting, the net result was that the “Kellogg mob” did decide to perform the experiment, and Ward Whaling and his colleagues were identified as the group that had the best experimental setup to perform the necessary measurements.

Whaling, Dunbar, and their collaborators decided to tackle the problem by bombarding nitrogen (¹⁴N) nuclei with deuterium (²H). This nuclear reaction produces carbon (¹²C) nuclei and alpha particles (⁴He). By examining carefully the energy of the outstreaming alpha particles (and remembering that the total energy is conserved), they could detect not only particles coming out with high energy (therefore leaving the carbon in its low-energy ground state) but also particles emerging with lower energy, indicating that some energy was left in the carbon nucleus. The results were clear. Within a couple of weeks, the experimental group found a resonance in carbon at 7.68 MeV (with a possible error of 0.03 MeV)—in incredible agreement with Hoyle’s prediction! In their just-over-one-page paper describing the results, the nuclear physicists started by noting: “Hoyle explains the original formation of elements heavier than helium by this process” (fusion of beryllium with helium). They finished with an acknowledgement: “We are indebted to Professor Hoyle for pointing out to us the astrophysical significance of this level.”

Despite his amazingly successful prediction, Hoyle realized that this was not the time to rest on his laurels. For carbon to survive, the nuclei had to obey yet another important requirement: Carbon had to be unable to rapidly capture a fourth alpha particle that would have transformed it all into oxygen. In other words, one had to be sure that there is no resonant state in the oxygen nucleus to enhance the carbon-plus-alpha reaction rate. To complete his triumph with the theory of carbon production, Hoyle showed that such a resonant reaction indeed does not occur—the energy of the respective level in oxygen is lower by about 1 percent from the value that would have made it resonant.